The fact is that rickshaws are too numerous in Peking and their fares too low. Even foreign residents grow flabby from so habitually jumping into one rather than walking a block or two, though I confess it is easier to do so than to endure the endless gauntlet of persistent shouting, and even subtle ridicule in the case of “foreign devils” supposedly ignorant of the language, which every well dressed pedestrian must run. Hard-hearted men assert that the oversupply is due to the laziness of the runners also, that coolies would rather wander about with a rickshaw than work all day at some steady labor. What will become of them when the street-cars arrive, for which the French were long ago granted a much-opposed franchise, is a question which men of higher intelligence than the runners themselves cannot answer. Yet they are coming; cement poles are already creeping into the Tartar City from the northwest, and rails are being piled up before the Forbidden City; unless Mukden outstrips her, Peking will be the first to follow foreign-influenced Tientsin and Shanghai by desecrating her streets with the ugliness and clamor of electric tramways. We are glad to have known the inimitable Chinese capital before they came.
The slowness of her man-drawn carriages and the dead flatness of Peking give an exaggerated impression of its size; everything seems farther away than it really is. In my school-days we used to hear wild tales about this being the largest city in the world. Perhaps it has a million inhabitants, though eight hundred and fifty thousand seems nearer the mark. There is no “squeeze” to be had out of a census, however, and guesses will probably continue to be the only available information on that point for years to come. A one-story city with the courtyard habit, to say nothing of enormous palaces and monuments that scarcely shelter a human being each, and of big vacant spaces even inside its principal wall, can hardly vie with New York and London, however like rats many of its people may live. In what we foreigners call the Chinese City there is a maze of shops and dwellings outside the three south gates of the capital proper, human warrens here and there, swarming sidewalk markets by night as well as crowded rows of booths by day; but vast graveyards, cultivated fields, even great unoccupied areas take up much of this secondary enclosure, not to mention the huge domains of the Temples of Heaven and of Agriculture, playgrounds now of those with the price of admission, with tea and soda-water and pumpkin seeds served almost on the very spot where the Son of Heaven so long held his annual vigil.